//

The 20 Best Film Scenes of 2017

These scenes will be taking up prime real estate within our collective memories for years to come.

The 20 Best Film Scenes of 2017
Photo: Wolfe Releasing

In a key scene from Marjorie Prime, a woman explains to her husband that memory functions like a copy of a copy, accessing one’s recollection of an event rather than the event itself. We might say that recalling films works in a similar way: As viewers, we remember a film through scenes and moments that help us to bring the full scope of the film into focus. From the young terrorist in Nocturama happening upon a mannequin in a department store wearing his exact outfit, to the set piece in The Square where an artist’s performance as an ape terrorizes a group of bourgeois patrons of the art, these instances can either be brief or extended expressions of a filmmaker’s big ideas. And whatever their length or scope, the 20 scenes on this list will likely be taking up prime real estate within our collective memories for years to come. Clayton Dillard


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JXgQ4UwPFc

Alien: Covenant, Fingering the Flute

Ridley Scott’s recent Alien films are triumphs of visual grammar wrapped in silly, bombastic creation myths, and nowhere is that strange brew more cohesive or potent than in what the Hollywood Reporter described as a “possibly homoerotic” scene from Alien: Covenant where Michael Fassbender’s deviant android, David, teaches the more advanced, docile synthetic Walter (also Fassbender) to play a hymn on a flute. “Watch me. I’ll do the fingering,” David says as the two are cocooned in a golden cave, lit by a paper lantern and surrounded by Giger-esque creature drawings. It’s an indelible wind-up to a smooch for the ages. Christopher Gray


YouTube video

Baby Driver, “Never, Never Gonna Give Ya Up”

Edgar Wright’s mixtape of a film Baby Driver left some wishing there had been a different DJ, but we have to give him and Baby (Ansel Elgort) credit, as there’s nothing like cueing up the right track for the right moment. Or, in the one instance where Baby’s own fastidious playlist fails him, the wrong moment. Baby, a knight in white earbuds, arrives at the diner where his damsel in distress (Lily James) is waiting. After hitting play on Barry White’s luxuriant “Never, Never Gonna Give Ya Up,” Jon Hamm’s unexpectedly persistent hood pops up to tensely turn the beat around. From seduction to showdown, Baby Driver is never more fleet on its feet. Eric Henderson


The 20 Best Film Scenes of 2017

Blade Runner 2049, Caught in a Trap

Over a hundred minutes deep into Blade Runner 2049, Ryan Gosling’s K is just moseying through the amber-colored ruins of Agent Deckard’s (Harrison Ford) Las Vegas retirement villa. After a good five minutes of near-silence, their long-awaited confrontation is emphatically dwarfed by its surroundings: frenetic strobe lighting, half-moon banquettes, haunting echoes, and a glitchy Elvis hologram stuck in the middle of “Suspicious Minds.” It’s odd to be so taken with a scene whose ambience is so superficially dazzling that its rather pivotal content (a shootout that’s meant to be the film’s emotional apex up to this point) is rendered utterly forgettable, but few films have ever encouraged this mode of viewing with more success than Blade Runner 2049. Gray

Advertisement


The 20 Best Film Scenes of 2017

BPM (Beats Per Minute), A River Runs Red

Compositionally, many of the exterior scenes from Robin Campillo’s BPM (Beats Per Minute), from marches to shock demonstrations, exude a constricted feeling, which has the unintended effect of diminishing the scope of what the characters resist: the seeming totality of a city turning its back on the undesirable. And, indeed, it’s precisely the jolt of recognition, specificity, and expansiveness that defines a powerful sequence that transitions from scenes of protest and subsequent dancing, all set to Bronski Beat’s “Smalltown Boy,” that most iconic of songs about traditional culture’s rejection of the homosexual, and an overhead shot of the Seine’s waters running red, almost as a punishment, with the blood of AIDS victims. Ed Gonzalez


YouTube video

Call Me by Your Name, “I Wanted You to Know”

In Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me by Your Name, Elio (Timothée Chalamet) and Oliver’s (Armie Hammer) stroll around a World War II monument situated in a small Italian town’s piazza is the impetus for a confession that will forever change their lives. While Elio talks about his feelings for Oliver in the abstract, the latter directly addresses the reason why Elio is opening his heart up to him. “Because I wanted you to know,” Elio says to Oliver, then over and over again to himself, with a mixture of surprise and relief that he even said the words aloud in the first place. Fittingly for a film that uses the body as a coded form of communication, the camera remains at a distance so as to showcase the body language between the soon-to-be lovers. Throughout this elegantly composed and blocked single take, history attests just as strongly to Elio’s emotional catharsis as the young man’s own words. Wes Greene


The 20 Best Film Scenes of 2017

Faces Places, Searching for Godard

Agnès Varda and Jean-Luc Godard helped redefine filmmaking as a personal, passionate art in the 1960s. No wonder, then, that Faces Places, a wily documentary celebrating how the power of the individual spirit helps reveal a greater collective consciousness, concludes with Varda and co-director JR trying to meet up with Godard. That the filmmaker proves quite literally elusive places Varda and JR in contemplation along an oceanfront. The trajectory of their documentary has changed, but it was beholden to chance all along. As Varda says early in the film, chance has always been her best assistant. Dillard


The 20 Best Film Scenes of 2017

The Florida Project, A Soda for a Pedophile

The Florida Project’s neorealist sense of anguish reaches peak form when Bobby (Willem Dafoe) identifies a potential pedophile chatting up the young residents of the Magic Castle. Bobby calmly, purposefully oversees the prowler purchase a soda—all before smashing the can from the man’s hand, snatching his license, and shouting his name to the motel’s rooftops. Recall the predatory figures cruising marketplaces for young boys in Bicycle Thieves and Germany, Year Zero and writer-director Sean Baker’s likening of the economic poverty in Kissimmee, Florida to postwar Rome, united by a child’s vulnerability in such conditions, gains exacting historical precedence. Dillard

Advertisement


YouTube video

Get Out, Entering the Sunken Place

A hypnosis scene that scans like a forced confession, this is the point at which Get Out’s ambient suspense and commentary on liberal racism are fused and rendered instantly iconic, culminating in the reveal of Jordan Peele’s bleak and ingeniously minimalist Sunken Place. Beyond the way that the sound of a teaspoon tinkling against and around a teacup comes into its rhythm or the reverse shots that creep closer and closer in on the faces of Daniel Kaluuya and Catherine Keener, marvel at the journey that Kaluuya goes on here, a steady descent from appraising self-consciousness to helpless desolation. Gray


The 20 Best Film Scenes of 2017

God’s Own Country, Skinning a Lamb

In a scene marked by its raw, documentary-like realism, Romanian sheep herder Gheorghe (Alec Secareanu) flays a dead lamb and places its pelt over another lamb so the mother of the dead animal will allow it to suckle. This sequence startlingly transitions from the shocking to the sad to the moving, an incredibly visceral symbol of God’s Own Country’s tumultuous central love affair between Gheorghe and Johnny (Josh O’Connor) and how the ugliest of beginnings can still result in moments of grace. Greene


The 20 Best Film Scenes of 2017

Good Time, Adventureland

At night, an emptied amusement park contains only the ghosts of pleasures past. In Good Time, it’s where Connie (Robert Pattinson) and Ray (Buddy Duress) return to retrieve some stashed goods. Confronted by the night watchman (Barkhad Abdi), Connie nearly beats him to a pulp, steals his uniform, and passes himself off as security once police arrive. Ray forces a gulp of acid down the watchman’s throat; the man screams, as if possessed, in an indecipherable language as he’s carted away. The ugliness of white privilege, found next to a pleasure palace, becomes in this scene a neon-lit horror show. Dillard


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNLhZVFIrTI

John Wick: Chapter 2, Museum Shootout

The elaborate fight choreography of Chad Stahelski’s John Wick: Chapter 2 reaches its apex in the kaleidoscopic visuals of the film’s extensive shootout inside a museum. The eye-popping action stylings of this endlessly inventive set piece include mirrors and neon lights which reflect, enhance, and distort Wick’s implacable thirst for vengeance. In playfully updating the iconic funhouse-set finale from Orson Welles’s The Lady from Shanghai, Stahelski constructed a formally dazzling scene full of remarkable long takes that put most of 2017’s other action films to shame. Derek Smith


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nlo6EHaGopA

The Lost City of Z, The Final Act

It’s not really technically accurate to call The Lost of City of Z’s sublime final movement, which runs approximately 10 minutes and spans continents and months of dramatic time across this duration, a “scene.” However, the narrative and stylistic fluidity achieved by director James Gray in this passage makes it feel like one long expressive exhale, not an “act” in any conventional sense. At this point in the story, the trajectory taken by ambitious Englishman Percy Fawcett (Charlie Hunnam) from the mouth of the Amazon jungle to its deepest recesses has been well established, so Gray sketches the passage in impressionistic glimpses, meanwhile gluing it all together with languid dissolves and Christopher Spelman’s sustained, anticipatory string swells. Over this period we’re also hearing Hunnam’s ruminative narration, which injects an impulsive romanticism to a montage of images that grow increasingly detached from reality, culminating in a sumptuous torch-lit procession that permits Gray to indulge a level of pictorial extravagance that’s always been within his reach but rarely been facilitated by his budgets. When Fawcett tells his son that “nothing will happen to us that is not our destiny,” it’s a phrase that not only movingly crystallizes the explorer’s mindset—a mix of arrogant naïveté and admirable gallantry—but also speaks to Gray’s path as a filmmaker. Carson Lund

Advertisement


The 20 Best Film Scenes of 2017

Marjorie Prime, “I Shall Be Released”

Marjorie Prime is an uncommonly empathetic portrait of broken people. Concerned with and pervaded by the ephemera that defines a life—and a group of commingled lives—it focuses on the moments of halcyon beauty and mourning that put into focus the past, sometimes reshaping and redefining it. In its final 30 minutes, the film redefines itself, as if it’s gained sentience. The holograms of the dead, still trying to understand their progenitors (as well as their artificial selves), begin to reveal information that, if true, changes everything that we’ve learned about those characters when they had corporeal, human form. But it’s not true. They’re repeating romantic lies that they were told. The great epiphanic moment comes when Tess (Geena Davis) speaks with her deceased mother’s prime (Lois Smith) about their different tastes in music, and how they never managed to bridge that schism in life. The prime, connected to the house’s music system, puts on the Band’s funereal “I Shall Be Released,” a song that conflates the pair’s contrasting classical and rock tastes. They sit, listening, and in their reticence they finally find something that eluded them for an entire lifetime. Captured with tranquil medium shots, the scene washes over you in gentle yet devastating waves. Greg Cwik

Advertisement


The 20 Best Film Scenes of 2017

Nocturama, Clash of the Swooshes

Frozen in time, doomed to repeat the past, chaos conveyed through a Nike Swoosh. Nocturama condenses George A. Romero’s allegory of cannibalistic consumerism to a single shot, where certain personal and cultural death wordlessly announces itself in the form of an icy mortal coil: You’re exactly who they wanted you to be. Dillard


The 20 Best Film Scenes of 2017

The Ornithologist, Morning Wood

After two Chinese Christians (Han Wen and Chan Suan) find the Portuguese birder Fernando (Paul Hamy) passed out floating on water, he wakes up bound and abandoned. Director João Pedro Rodrigues stages Fernando’s dawning recognition of his plight with reverence and a prime example of The Ornithologist’s mischievous visual humor. He looks like a religious icon until the camera backs away from him and his expression withers into vague humiliation. A bird seems to gawk at his morning wood. The nearly nude Fernando is at once fetishized and ridiculed, appropriately enough for a film that’s sacred, profane, and mundane all at once. Gray


The 20 Best Film Scenes of 2017

Paris 05:59: Théo & Hugo, The Orgy

The first sequence of Olivier Ducastel and Jacques Martineau’s Paris 05:59: Théo & Hugo is an epic orgy that recalls the ludic eroticism of James Bidgood’s Pink Narcissus. As in that 1971 gay classic, no one speaks throughout this dreamlike ballet, yet everyone seems to know exactly what to do, when to turn, where to lick. The delectable male bodies are only “clothed” by the theatrical red-and-blue lighting as they pant like hungry beasts. For all its explicitness, the sequence feels closer to magical realism than pornography. Its relentlessness, as there seems to be no end in sight for so much enjoyment, points to a yearning for something far beyond the most readily available orifice. While the English title of the film offers a sense of temporal precision (the original French title translates to Théo and Hugo on the Same Boat), time is completely foreign to the orgy. There is only flesh, fantasy, and the delightful disregard for whatever comes after. Diego Semerene


The 20 Best Film Scenes of 2017

Phantom Thread, The Fitting

In Phantom Thread, Paul Thomas Anderson fashions one of his subtlest, most astonishing set pieces out of Reynolds Woodcock’s (Daniel Day-Lewis) measuring of Alma (Vicky Krieps) for a dress: The camera glides along the measuring tape, enjoying her body less than his ability to seize control of the moment by embracing his art. In this moment, Reynolds is every artist who dreams of the women whom fame would net him, yet when he’s alone with a woman, he retreats into his head. This sequence is a sex scene in which Reynolds makes love to himself in front of Alma, luxuriating in his talent and ability to assume her into his ongoing tapestry of perfection, in which beauty’s packaged in a process of transcendental and repressive consumption that’s enjoyed by men as well as women. Chuck Bowen

Advertisement


The 20 Best Film Scenes of 2017

A Quiet Passion, A Leap in Time

In transitioning from A Quiet Passion’s prologue, set during Emily Dickinson’s young adulthood, to decades later, Terence Davies employs four successive, majestic zooms and subtly detailed CGI to elegantly trace the gradual aging and hardening of the faces of each member of the Dickinson family while they pose for daguerreotypes. Rarely has the elliptical passage of time been rendered more fluidly, efficiently, and poetically than in this brief but stunning sequence. Smith


The 20 Best Film Scenes of 2017

Son of Joseph, A Peeping Vincent

Eugène Green’s singular, pronounced use of direct address gets so much attention that the filmmaker’s other stylistic virtues often go underappreciated—namely, his knack for delivering only the most essential dramatic information in a scene while adhering to a strict aural and visual austerity. In Son of Joseph, one scenario takes this principle of elimination to its radical peak. When troubled Parisian teenager Vincent (Victor Ezenfis) starts spying on his suspected father Oscar (Mathieu Amalric), Green stages a delightfully awkward moment in Oscar’s office that unfolds entirely from the perspective of his snooping estranged son. Much of the scene unfolds in an innocuous floor-level shot that assumes the vantage point of Vincent in his hiding spot underneath a fainting couch. While Oscar engages in some afternoon delight with a female visitor off camera, we’re left to admire the decorative construction of the furniture, with the sound communicating everything else we need to know. It’s a brilliant synthesis of Green’s dramatic efficiency and comic deadpan. Lund


YouTube video

The Square, The Ape Man Cometh

Ruben Östlund’s The Square satirizes contemporary art’s patronizing attitude toward the other and its penchant for virtue signaling. In a climactic scene, based on the work of real-life performance artist Oleg Kulik, a man unleashes his inner animal in an increasingly feral attack on unsuspecting art patrons at a gala dinner in Stockholm. The moment is a ferocious jab at art’s inability to create actual change in a world seemingly coming apart at the seams. The scene starts with patrons standing idly by as a performance artist (Oleg Kulik) very nearly rapes a woman and ends with a bloodthirsty mob of men violently pummeling the artist. Shot in the same room where the Nobel Prize is awarded, Ostlund implies that, as a species, humans are incapable of responding to violence with anything other than indifference or more violence. Oleg Ivanov

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.